Political Wisdom: Exploiting the Oil Spill

“Rule 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” said Rahm Emanuel on Nov. 9, 2008. “They are opportunities to do big things.” But in the wake of the Gulf oil spill, Democrats have failed to follow Rule 2: Shameless emotional exploitation is your friend. Logic would suggest that the BP oil spill would make comprehensive energy legislation more likely, if not inevitable—especially if, as appears to be the case, there were systemic lapses that contributed to the accident. Instead, legislation has become less likely….There would come a point, you’d think, when the oil spill was such an unmitigated disaster, environmentally and politically, that Republicans would set aside their ultimatums about drilling, Democrats would set aside their paranoia about it, and members of both parties would support alternative energy legislation. Not all of them. Just a handful would be enough. But for that to happen, Democrats would have to demand it. And so far they haven’t.

But who is in charge of stopping the oil spill, BP or the federal government? The fact that there’s no consensus is reason to revive an old debate, writes E.J. Dionne Jr. in The New Republic.

The fact that the answer to this question seems as murky as the water around the exploded oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico suggests that this is an excellent moment to recognize that our arguments pitting capitalism against socialism and the government against the private sector muddle far more than they clarify….But the truth is that we have disempowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task. The sludge in the Gulf is, finally, the product of our own contradictions.

Indeed, the uncontrolled corruption of the spill — the failure of government, business and technology to manage an essential, if archaic, resource — beggared all human pretense. Nature was mocking the conservative faith in untrammeled market freedom and the liberal faith that market excesses can be regulated.

Dan Froomkin at The Huffington Post says the spill has done nothing to engender the nation’s goodwill towards the president.

Instead, the Gulf oil spill risks turning into an object lesson in ineffective leadership and the corporate capture of government — precisely the opposite of the lessons we expected Obama to teach the nation. So far, certainly, there’s been nothing about Obama’s response to this disaster that inspires hope; while way too much of it breeds cynicism.

But Tunku VaraDarajan at The Daily Beast contends that Obama is not to blame.

Writers have been free with their superlatives of calamity, the most common being a likening of the spill to Hurricane Katrina: “Obama’s Katrina,” many have written, glibly judgmental. And going one step further up the ladder of shrillness, Thomas Friedman, the Emperor of Glib, has been imperiously judgmental, calling the spill “Obama’s 9/11.” The oil spill is none of the above. It is not even “Obama’s oil spill,” if by saying so we mean to ascribe culpability to the president. He didn’t run the rigs, or oversee the plans, or grant the licenses to drill, or write the rules that govern the granting of those licenses. He was just president when the bloody thing happened (cf. Bush, 9/11). Not one iota of this sticky mess is Obama’s doing, by any rational calculus of causation.

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